Velya just got back to the city last night and he's not really looking forward to taking a walk around, Zorvey is one of his least favorite places.

There is a child in a basket by the front door and that's as good an excuse not to go for a walk as any, really. He picks up the basket in his gloved hands and takes it inside. If the child sleeps through that (or the adult bodysnatcher pretends to sleep through it, either way) he'll probably wake them anyway by shouting for Tema and Chanai.

The child doesn't wake up to being lifted but does to the shouting. She looks confused.

Tema isn't far at all, and shows up almost immediately.

"We can just leave the obvious trap on the street for someone else, you know. Everything in that basket is almost definitely cursed even besides the obvious."

"Well that's rude."

"You know, obvious trap or not, you're very cute, itty bitty little basket person." They're trying to watch for signs that the basket entity is annoyed or nonplussed at being called cute in the way that an adult might be. It's reasonably likely that a human baby left on a random doorstep is not a human baby, and pretty concerning if it's not a random doorstep either.

"You could have just left me on the street. I can go back out right now, if you don't want me in the house, notwithstanding that apparently you brought me here?" She starts squirming out of her blanket.

"I did that because one of the reasons someone might have left you here is if you're a child who's just a slow study at magic and needs more competent teaching to avoid being killed. Even if it's really unlikely it seemed important to check."

"- I think I have amnesia but I remember how to make potions."

He looks at Tema.

"Potions, huh? What do they do?"

"Lots of stuff. It depends what ingredients I have. I can make a good healing po- hm, I'm not sure it would work on you? I could make a good healing potion that would work on me. I would probably need different stuff for you."

"I'm glad you can do that but I think you'll be safer if your magic does something else - can you maybe make things fly or change color or can you put someone to sleep or blind them?"

"I could do colors or sleeping or blinding probably. With the right ingredients."

"Good, we'll help you find the ingredients you need. I'm sorry to scare you but you're about the right age to be checked for magic and if people thought you didn't have any you'd be in danger."

"I had begun to gather that."

"Yeah. The problem is that you look human, and there are bad people who look human and can't do magic - but you don't have to worry about it beyond making it clear you're not one of them. What ingredients do you need?"

"Can I just look at what there is to use and see what I could make of it?"

She turns to Velya. "Can you go - no, I guess you wouldn't know where I've moved things - can you watch her while I get some herbs?"

Velya nods and Tema goes to do that.

"Watch me do what?"

"Well, it's possible you're an adult who's lying to us to try to hurt Tema, and it's also possible you're a toddler in a room that isn't set up to be safe for a toddler and might hurt yourself by accident. I would rather neither of those things happen."

"I don't see how I'd hurt myself just by sitting here waiting for ingredients."

"A human the age that your body would be if it were a human body might decide to wait for ingredients and then do something else because their decisions and their actions hadn't grown all the way together yet."

"Well, if you're very worried about that you could give me a book to read."

"Well, and also I don't want to hand you fragile valuables. D'you know if it's normal for your species to know how to read at your age?"

"No, I don't even remember what species I am."

That's when Tema and Chanai show up with a collection of little bits of different kinds of dried herbs and spices.

"Apple," Velya says, which seems to mean something to Tema. "She mentioned she can read."

She goes sifting through the herb options, looking at them, touching a couple, sniffing one.

Rose, ashwagandha, valerian... a lot of things, and only small amounts of each. Nothing too dangerous to touch even though some plants are both dangerous to touch and magically useful.

"Can I have some tweezers or gloves or something?"

"You should have gloves, I just don't have gloves your size lying around. I bet we have tweezers - " Tema glances at Chanai.

Chanai has tweezers and other things in a little case in his pocket. He offers the tweezers to their guest very carefully, as though even wearing gloves and long sleeves he's terribly concerned about accidentally touching her.

She can hold out her hand flat to catch them dropped.

He smiles at her and drops them and backs away.

She chooses a container that will hold more than it presently does and starts tweezing other things into it. "This'll turn my hair pink," she says. "But it'll take a few minutes to work once I drink it."

The adults exchange meaningful looks.

"I'd love to see that," Tema says firmly.

"Should I drink it now or wait till more people are watching?"

"I want to see it and I think it's one of not very many abilities you could have that would be more worrying than not having magic. Anything where you change bodies like that will be a bad choice for - you know what, how about you drink it and I explain this whole situation while we wait for your hair to change color."

"You suggested changing colors! You should have been more specific." Swig.

"Yes, that's my fault. I'll try to explain enough that you can fill in some when I forget to say things."

Tema backs up a bit but then squats down so she's not looming. This person, child or otherwise, doesn't really seem to be getting tangled in long sentences or struggling to keep up with the breadth of the adults' everyday vocabulary, but then, Tema was like that at that age. Doesn't mean she needs the adult version of history. - Also she might be missing things and not asking for clarification, this hasn't been the least hostile interaction they could possibly have had.

"A long, long time ago, there were humans, like now, who had magic that touched souls. And not like now, there were others, the fair ones, who had magic that touched bodies. They could heal, or they could make people stop moving, or they could probably have changed the color of their hair. They used their magic to hurt people, humans and each other and mermaids and maybe even dragons and phoenixes. And so the other species got together and took their magic away. Humans in some places - like here in Zorvey - don't think that's enough, because you can hurt people without any magic. So we don't want people here if we can't prove they're not secretly the fair ones. That make sense so far?"

"I guess, yeah. I could make..." She looks at the herbs thoughtfully. "...furniture varnish?"

"Does it do something regular furniture varnish doesn't?"

"I don't know much about regular furniture varnish." Inspect inspect. "You said sleep would be okay?"

"Sleep is what human kids do."

"Does it have to work on me or you?"

"It has to work on someone who wouldn't pretend for you. Though I'm... not honestly sure you wouldn't be better off just leaving the country and going somewhere they don't check, which is actually something I can arrange for you."

"I'm not sure why I wound up here to begin with so maybe that would work fine or even be better if I was left here by a hostile party which seems likely, or maybe it would have some catastrophic problem. I can do a sleep potion that would work on you. Or me but it would have to be totally different."

"I do think you were left here by a hostile party and I'm trying not to make that your problem if you're not hostile yourself. I don't know what might be catastrophic for your species but I would expect being in the Federation to be fine for a human - that's a place where it'd be fine whatever species you turned out to be - but I suppose travel is sometimes dangerous."

"Well, I have amnesia, which seems pretty hostile, but if someone was trying to kill me I'm not sure why they... didn't... kill me, so I'm kind of confused."

"I think I was a target, not just you. It's not friendly at all to drop a toddler with healing powers on my doorstep, it really puts me on the spot."

"Why would anyone hold you responsible for me?"

"If I wrongly concluded you weren't evil and took you in, then it would be reasonable to hold me a little responsible, and also you know enough magic to cause problems yourself. If I wrongly concluded you were evil, and killed you myself or let someone else hurt or kill you, that would also be a problem. And time passes for you while I think about it, it'd be very expensive to stick you in a jar while I figure it out, and I'd need someone to keep your body alive and it'd be a problem if it outgrew you, assuming it's the right age for you in the first place."

"I suppose since I don't remember anything I might not remember it if this is not my original body. It feels normal but I don't know if that's expected. How would you get in trouble if I weren't evil and you killed me? Nobody could prove it once I was dead. Not that I want you to do this."

"Many people find it extremely distressing to kill toddlers. Also, I have no idea how many people know you're here, or whether anyone has arranged anything to catch your soul if you die."

"Is it... less distressing to kill evil toddlers? Less likely that someone knows where they are?"

"Honestly, not by very much."

"Well, I appreciate you looking out for me insofar as any of your motives have to do with that. Do I need to make more than one person's dose of sleeping potion?"

"I don't expect you will. Do your potions keep well?"

"In a good container sure. Do you have glass vials and wax?"

"I can arrange some of those for you. To be clear, I'm not basing how willing I am to help you get out of the country or something on whether you can make a sleep potion, and I do think that's probably your best option."

"It seems probably wise for me to have a dose of sleep potion on me even if I then immediately leave the country."

"I agree. I just wanted to be clear about that. I'll go get you some vials."

"Thank you."

She organizes herself a mise en place.

And then she can have some vials and pick her favorite from a few sizes.

She picks a big one so she can fit two doses. Mix mix mix. "Can I have something sharp, I want to nick my finger for this one."

She seems like she's basically in control of her body in a way human children of her apparent age usually aren't. Velya offers her a knife, hilt first. "Do you think you can handle this or should someone go find something smaller?"

"This is fine." She nicks her finger. A thin pale liquid, like nectar or weak lemonade, comes out of the wound; she squeezes three drops into the vial, then returns the knife and puts her finger in her mouth.

"Did you know that's not the color human blood is or the color the other ones' blood is said to have been?"

"No. What's blood?"

"It's a liquid that's inside your body and keeps it alive."

"I didn't know the word 'blood'. I don't remember learning your language so that could be for all kinds of reasons but it seems to me that if I don't have blood like yours and don't know what it's called it's possible mine is not blood. Does this obviate the need for a sleep potion?"

"Probably, yeah. Though it's not unreasonable to have one on hand anyway, I suppose."

"I do prefer not having to injure myself when I can avoid it."

Tema giggles and Velya nods.

"You know, I feel the very same way," says Chanai.

She nods and finishes her sleep potion and then caps it off.

"So. You're probably fine and have substantially fewer constraints on your future plans than we've been assuming. If you want the ongoing help of my household and myself it's still on offer."

"Help doing what?"

"Learning facts like 'most people have blood' and sourcing potion ingredients and foods and interacting with architecture designed for taller people and identifying what kinds of things are worth your time to learn and getting introduced to other people who might want to hire you or might have things to teach you. Also, I'm not completely sure you're not a child, and human children benefit from having adults who help them think through how they want to grow up, on a personal level."

"Those sound like good things to have help with but I'm not actually clear why you want to offer them to me."

"Well, at the cost of sounding extraordinarily mercenary, no one else I have ever heard of has healing powers and I don't know why you're here and I'm worried if you die there will go back to being no people with healing powers in contact with any humans I know about."

"Oh. Okay, that's a great reason. I would like being able to heal lots of people!"

"This would have been so much more annoying if you'd been evil. Well, got any idea what you eat and if you sleep?"

"I eat... food? I guess I don't know if you eat food. Maybe you eat rocks or dead animals or something. I think I sleep."

"I eat one kind of rock and lots of kinds of dead animals and eggs and milk and lots of kinds of leaves and stems and fruits and flowers but mostly I eat seeds."

"Wow. I don't think I eat any rocks or dead animals, I don't know what the next two things are, and the rest of it sounds fine."

"When you get hungry, if you know what being hungry feels like, someone can round up some plant foods for you to try. Eggs are where some species come from - like seeds for animals - and milk is something animals feed their children."

"I will recognize being hungry. I'm not right now."

"That's good. Anyway, I think with all this excitement we may have forgotten to introduce ourselves - I'm Tema, these are Chanai and Velya, and you might also meet another person here whose name is Tyela."

"I can't remember my name."

"I'm sorry. Do you want an extra name while you're waiting or do you want to wait in case you remember?"

"An extra name to use at least for now, I think."

"Where my parents and Velya's are from people have names like Divna and Iskra, and where Chanai's parents are from people have names like Aran and Oma. If it ends up making sense for me to formally adopt you you could take my surname, Miara, for the second part of your name, but you'd still need a given name even then."

"Iskra's pretty. And so's Miara."

"It's nice to meet you, Iskra. Anyway, since you are at least very confused and possibly young, I'm inclined to think you probably want Chanai or Velya to spend some time getting you up to speed - if you demonstrate that you can be gentle with them and keep your hands clean you can also borrow my books but I'm not sure if they're the right sort of thing to be helpful to you - and if you need anything else, you can ask someone."

"I think apart from my little injury my hands are clean."

"Yes, but they need to be consistently clean any time you touch any of my books."

"Where does one clean one's hands?"

Chanai feels like taking the lead on this one. "We actually keep some clean water and a towel by the library door, and in other places around the house, and when we need more water we get it out of the fountain in the courtyard."

"Okay. I can wash my hands before touching books. Gently."

Chanai smiles. "If you want I can show you to the library now."

"Yes please."

Librarywards! Along the way they don’t encounter anyone else but can hear someone singing in another room.

The library is notably poorly configured for a child, with most of the lowest books being huge reference books or books on niche topics.

Is there a chair she can stand on?

Yep. Kind of heavy but Chanai can move it for her, or (now that they're not on maximally high alert for a bodysnatcher and everyone has relatedly chilled out a little about touch) pick her up.

"Got any idea what you’d like or do you just want to see what there is?"

"I'm just browsing although if you do happen to have a summary of how everything works for an amnesiac that would be awesome."

"It seems like what you don’t know is either where you come from - and there won’t be any books about that here - or how humans live, and that’s the kind of thing humans treat as too big for one book, but there’s a book about traveling through the islands south of here that might help you think about what the important parts of a human life are. And there's a book about how to use human magic."

"The first one seems more important for the moment since I won't be able to use the book about human magic."

Here it is! In addition to the landscapes (often mountainous) the writer paid a lot of attention to the food (they eat a lot of fish and grape and olive products on the largest and northernmost island) and the architecture (there are illustrations; far enough south the roofs get very steep) and the languages ("Southern Trade" is pretty much what they speak in Zorvey but they have another language in the far south) and the clothing (they can copy Rekki fashions in Miomir, though they often don’t, but any further south than that they do something completely different).

"You guys will just eat a fish?"

"You have to cook it first, it’s no good raw."

"I don't see how that improves matters!"

"It might not for your species! Humans can eat more kinds of things cooked than raw."

"I guess there might be things like that for me but I don't know them off the top of my head."

"That's not surprising."